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Tweetstorms are usually the work of one person, but what if you could bring other voices in too? That’s what The Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, and Chicago Tribune did this week: They worked together to tweet about the riots that followed Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968.

The threaded tweets linked back to the papers’ own coverage of the 50th anniversary of the assassination and how it affected their respective cities. Here’s the Post’s coverage, here’s the Sun’s, and here’s the Tribune’s.

Fifty years ago today, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was slain in Memphis.

When word reached Washington, D.C., chaotic riots left 13 dead and more than 900 businesses damaged.

Baltimore would erupt two days later, and stay on edge for nearly a week. Its riots were blamed for six deaths and hundreds of injuries. More than 1,000 businesses were torched, damaged, looted or destroyed. https://t.co/eB8JWI5IUcpic.twitter.com/ywN7Je7e6y

The thread was the original idea of Tauhid Chappell, who until recently was an embedded audience editor on The Washington Post’s local desk (he’ll soon start a position as the engagement editor at the Philly Inquirer). The project was run by the Post’s Julie Vitkovskaya, digital operations/projects director, and Ric Sanchez, social media editor; the Tribune’s digital news editor Elizabeth Wolfe, and the Sun’s audience editor Steve Earley. In a shared Google doc, they planned out tweets, including the timestamps for roughly when each would go out. The first tweet was sent at 7:01 p.m. ET on April 4, almost exactly 50 years since King was pronounced dead and the riots began. The papers will continue to tweet for as long as the riots lasted in their cities: The Post will stop adding to the thread on April 7, the Tribune will add to it through April 8, and the Sun will add to the thread through April 14, when the Baltimore riots ended.

Vitkovskaya has been thinking about how a group tweet thread would work within the Post — for example, the Post’s main account could start tweeting about a story like the violence in Gaza, and then the Post’s Jerusalem bureau chief, Loveday Morris, could continue tweeting and reporting from Gaza itself over a period of several days. “We see this as a tool we’d like to use again,” she said.

Including an awesome range of elements (animated GIFs, infographics, videos, and embedded surveys and quizzes), Quartz delivers some of the most engaging and interactive newsletters we’ve ever seen. Design-wise, they’re clean and consistent. Content-wise, they’re smart, relevant, and well-written. And the topics of their Obsession emails are random and nerdy enough to give you a killer edge at trivia night.

Gamifying their newsletter has yielded tremendous results: growing to 700,000 subscribers, they doubled the size of their subscriber base in 2017. ….

In mid-2016, Aviv Ovadya realized there was something fundamentally wrong with the internet — so wrong that he abandoned his work and sounded an alarm. A few weeks before the 2016 election, he presented his concerns to technologists in San Francisco’s Bay Area and warned of an impending crisis of misinformation in a presentation he titled “Infocalypse.”

“What happens when anyone can make it appear as if anything has happened, regardless of whether or not it did?” technologist Aviv Ovadya warns.

Big data is a big deal, and if you follow the popular technical press, you’ll have heard all the metaphors: data is the new oil, the new bacon, the new currency, the new electricity. It’s even been called the new black. While data may not actually be any of these things, we can say this: in today’s networked world, data is increasingly valuable, and it is essential to research, both basic and applied. Continue reading “Getting Linked In to Data Science with Dr. Igor Perisic”→

More than half of Facebook’s launch partners on Instant Articles appear to have abandoned the format, new Tow Center research suggests. Of 72 publishers that Facebook identified as original partners in May and October 2015, our analysis of 2,308 links posted to their Facebook pages on January 17, 2018, finds that 38 publications did not […]

“Ten years from now, I expect biomedical research will look much different than it does today. I expect researchers will be able to tap a wide range of data streams, which will not only be accessible, they will all be in a format that can be easily shared and reused. By building upon each other’s data, researchers will be able to collectively accelerate biomedical discovery.”

The academic discovery space seems to be buzzing again. This space has become relatively stable after the introduction and maturity of Web Scale Discovery between 2009-2013, but things seem to be hotting up once again.